


Counting

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Dead Like Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-20
Updated: 2006-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:28:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At what point does a dead girl stop celebrating her birth?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Counting

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cyanne

 

 

It's the journey, not the destination. Whoever believes that crap never had to sit through three hours of traffic in a police car with Roxy and Mason.

"Can't you turn the siren on? If the siren's on, we can go straight through."

"No."

Staying mute is the only guaranteed way to leave this car uninjured.

"Roxy, I could die back here. I'm claustraphobic."

"You're annoying is all you are."

"Why aren't there doorknobs back here? There really should be doorknobs--what kind of car doesn't have doorknobs?"

To-tal silence.

"What if we're in a car wreck and the metal gets all twisted up in front and the car bursts into flames and all throughout I'm stuck back here in this little bitty cage--"

That's it. "Cars don't have doorknobs, you ninny." I'm running out of generic insults to use on Mason. I've kind of been waiting for a chance to use that one, though. "They don't put door *handles* in the backseat because people in the backseats of police cars usually don't have the choice of leaving. And if we crash, it's only because you're distracting Roxy. Not that it'll matter, since you're *dead*."

"But why do I have to sit back here?"

Roxy's lips are almost white. There are slivers in the steering wheel from her fingernails. "Call shotgun faster next time," she says, ignoring him when Mason hooks his fingers in the fenced partition and pushes his face against the wire. Sometimes I wonder why Mason lived so long.

"Georgie, switch with me. Let me sit up front."

"I called shotgun."

Mason flops back into his seat. In the rear view mirror, he sticks his tongue out at me. "I'll remember this, Georgia Lass. After I'm full dead and I'm wherever dead people go, I'll tell everyone what a greedy little girl you are."

Which reminds me. "I'll be twenty soon." At what point does a dead girl stop celebrating her birth? Does Roxy still do something for her birthday? Or Daisy? Hell, does Rube even *remember* his birthday? Is it weird to celebrate getting older when you're...not?

"Roxy, how old are you?"

"I don't brag about it."

"I find age and experience quite attractive in a woman," Mason says.

"I can escalate your trip to 'full dead' if you keep it up."

"Sorry, copper."

-|||-

Reggie drew me a picture for my ninth birthday. She was young and she didn't have money or taste in...anything, so she went with a guilty gift. Guilty in that if I were--for example--to say,

"I don't like goldfish,"

When the thing was actually a platypus, and my mother told me to,

"Just say 'thank you,' Georgia,"

While my sister worked her crocodile tears--then I'd feel guilty. So Reggie got away with giving me cheap (and inaccurately depicted) gifts.

The next year, Reggie sculpted me a toad. Or a squid. But I think she just let me call it a squid because I said,

"You're not normal,"

And made her laugh.

-|||-

I had a geometry test on my fourteenth birthday, and I swallowed a glass of egg whites and milk to postpone taking it. My mom--no one should be surprised to learn--was the type of mother who kept her child home only after visual confirmation of fever, vomit or portruding bone. Also unsurprisingly, I successfully faked sick a grand total of three times in my academic career.

I used up all of them when I was seven.

My mother guided me to the table and pressed on my shoulders until my ass met the chair. Hello-o, chair.

Umgf. Hello, eggs. Fucking Sean Gibney. (That was the last time I took the word of a lactose-intolerant kid on how much human digestion can take. Mine was like the dog you get to protect your home and ends up humping the thief's leg while he boxes your flatscreen.)

"I know about your math test, Georgia."

Well, sure you do. "I'd be alarmed if you didn't." It causes me pain, after all.

"Reggie heard you talking to a boy on the phone last--"

"God damn it, Reggie!" I started to stand up, felt the Mom Palm on my shoulder and sat down again. Fumed for a while while my mother listed all the ways I couldn't deceive her.

Among other things, I heard the You're Going to School and the You're Taking That Test and the We'll Have Cake Tonight at Your Party and the I'm Sorry You Couldn't Have a Party This Year But You Had Such a Nice One Last Year--

Blah blah.

Blah blahdi blah blah.

I went to school, I took the fucking test. I did not have cake with my family. Well, not my whole family.

Before fifth period, someone on the PA called me to the office. The receptionist told me my Great Aunt Flo had died that morning choking on her eggs.

My dad was waiting outside to take me to Ben & Jerry's for ice cream cake.

-|||-

I didn't remember my birthday last year. Mason and I were waiting for a guy in stilts to step onto a rogue red ball from the ball pit and bonk his head on the plastic knee of Chuck E. Cheese.

Most kids have a birthday party at a place like Chuck E. Cheese. Most of my classmates did, anyway. When I was invited, I took a box of pizza behind the arcade games and waited it out. Sometimes another kid would find me, and I'd give away a slice for a vow of silence.

Other kids had treasure hunts or scavanger hunts.

Some kids had pin-the-tail-on-the-discount-priced-animal.

I had Joy Lass's crumbling birthday cakes and an extra movie before bedtime.

It's not surprising I'd be reminded of my birthday in a police car.

Sometimes I can remember her pinning silver garland around my bed, so that when I'd wake up, it'd be to a "shining new year."

I also remember eating clouds of crème brûlée, so my memory's probably not the most accurate archive of my life.

-|||-

When you've worked long enough as an aide to death, you realize why the living celebrate their survival. You can't watch the hundreds of bizarre ways life ends without thinking of all the ways you didn't die.

Rocking chair race off a staircase.

Battle with a ten-year-old can opener.

Dasher, Dancer and Blitzen going hara-kiri off the roof, tied at the shoulders and around your elbow.

Poisoned apple. (It was a weird sorority.)

It's maybe better to know all this after you're dead. It never cheered me up when people told me to enjoy my fleeting youth. My youth will be fleeting nowhere anytime soon. Fat bunch of good that advice did me.

I'll be twenty in a month. I don't think it matters, not in numbers. I don't think it matters that way when you're alive, either. If there was ever a culture that valued experience over age, they did it right. Maybe the only way to judge a gift or a gesture or a memory is by what it makes you feel instead of when or how much or how often. You have more when you're not counting.

 


End file.
